Tuesday, August 8, 1995

Q&A Allen Ginsberg: Anxious Dreams of Eliot

at 2:50 PM March 10 1955
reached point in time where life was no longer suffering but to live was a pleasure.
Allen Ginsberg, "Journals Mid-Fifties (1954-1958)"

HB: What struck me most reading the "Journals
Mid-Fifties" is the theme of love. You discuss it on a cosmic spiritual
level, but also in terms of a masochism and submissiveness you wrestle with
constantly.

AG: I hadn't thought of it as masochism but I guess it's so.

HB: You use the word a lot.

AG: It's kind of a buzz word.

HB: You write: "Love is complete...It never lacks
because it is All. It comes on the mind in visions. Watch for it coming! It
enters the house of the body without your seeking." You say that, on the
one hand. On the other, you say, "That kind of love of mine is a
sickness...Am I nuts?"

AG: Almost anybody, from Shakespeare on, who talks about
love, talks about the pains of love, the thorns of love--the bed of love is a
rose with thorns. It's par for the course, in a sense. Very often, I'm
presenting worst case scenarios, too, you know, the worst fantasies.

In the situation with
Neal Cassady, we were friends, very close friends, until his death, and in and
out of bed together over 20 years. With Peter Orlovsky, though there was a lot
of struggle in connecting with him, we were together from 1954 to the present,
more or less. So they're the birth pangs.

HB: This passage stays with me: "I have held on to
self-pity so long as a primary source of emotion in love, I hardly know what
would replace it in my feelings if it went."

AG: The awareness of self-pity is the medicine for
self-pity.

HB: The desire for total surrender to someone--or total
union with someone--runs through your work.

AG: Or total mastery, one or the other, it's the reverse
side of the coin.

HB: It also comes across as tenderness.

AG: I wonder if the masochist aspect cancels out the
genuineness of the tenderness. That would be the logical question.

Probably I always felt
kind of stupid and inferior and ugly and fell in love with people I felt were
beautiful and more true than myself. Probably the quality of devotion and
desire, or the intensity of devotion or desire, were the strongest and the most
permanent elements in the relationship. So that which was considered, say,
inferior or weaker was, because it gave rise to devotion and intense adoration,
the cause of a stronger durable passion. Nowadays a lot of that devotion is
transferred over to Buddhist dharma and the relation to the teacher, the master,
the meditation instructor.

HB: You still practice meditation.

AG: I'm very much involved, and have been for many years,
with the Naropa Institute and activity related to the spread of dharma through
education. With Gelek Rinpoche, a teacher from Ann Arbor, a Tibetan teacher.
Philip Glass and I are students of his. We've done a lot of benefits for the
Jewel Heart Meditation Center in Ann Arbor, and I see Rinpoche a lot, visit Ann
Arbor and seek advice, go on retreats with him.

It's student learning,
setting other people before myself and trying to listen to them and pay
attention to them rather than trying to dominate them.

HB: A theme that runs through the dreams you record in the
"Journals"--and you pay a lot of attention to your dreams--is that of
acceptance. You have recurrent anxiety dreams about being outside the academy,
outside a career path. There's a dream in which T.S. Eliot is reading your
poetry. You're in tears; T.S. Eliot's reading your poetry!

AG: That was a very funny dream, particularly the idea of
Eliot putting me to bed in his digs in Chelsea, getting me an English hot
toddy, whatever that is, a hot water bottle you take to bed with you to keep
your feet warm.

HB: Do you still dream about Eliot?

AG: No. Bob Dylan.

HB: But Dylan likes you.

AG: In the dream.

HB: Doesn't he like you in reality?

AG: Yeah.

HB: So it's not a problem.

AG: But it's more overt in the dream.

HB: He likes you even better.

AG: It's more demonstrative.

HB: There's a good deal of discussion of canons now,
canon-making, canon-breaking. "Howl" set off similar kinds of debates
in the 1950s. Someone like Trilling didn't want to discuss your work as poetry
at all.

AG: Oddly enough, Trilling changed his mind, and in his
monumental anthology of world literature, he included me with Shakespeare and
Sophocles. The poem "Aunt Rose" is what he chose. The Jewish family
sense in that poem, and the emotion, finally got to him and he realized what I
was doing was grounded; it wasn't hippy-dippy and it wasn't crazy.

AG: He may be good on Blake and earlier things but I've
looked at the choices of contemporary materials and they're not very inspiring.

HB: He's a canon-maker.

AG: Not really. In ten years it will be obsolete.

HB: A would-be canon maker.

AG: Everybody's a would-be canon maker. He just advertises himself
as a canon maker but he doesn't make the canon. Readers make the canon.

And much of that has
changed. As of this last year, Kerouac is becoming more recognized as a
monumental writer of the late-20th century who knew what he was doing, better
than Truman Capote in terms of writing. There have been several reviews that
point out Kerouac accomplished a work with vast scope, as distinct from the
Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, middlebrow view that he had one interesting book,
"On The Road," and the rest was not readable.

But among poets,
Kerouac is known to be a seminal influence not only on me but on Bob Dylan as
well Gary Snyder and Robert Creely. It's obvious that Kerouac and Ma Rainey and
Robert Johnson will be in anthologies sooner or later. To the extent that
someone like Bloom doesn't get it--it never occurred to him that American Black
blues, early century up to the '30s, might be part of the canon like the
Scottish border ballads or the anonymous 14th-century lyrics are in the Oxford
Book of English poetry--to that extent he's missing the mark. Burroughs was
understood all the way through. Everybody from Mary McCarthy on paid homage to
Burroughs as a great writer, even Samuel Beckett. Nobody has disputed that
except a lunatic fringe. You could call Bloom part of the lunatic fringe in
that sense.

HB: I'd love to call him part of the lunatic fringe.

AG: It's at such a disparity with intelligent opinion. I
don't think he puts Burroughs in the canyon

HB: I think he does put him in the canyon.

AG: Burroughs has an enormous influence on high culture, low
culture, an all-pervading influence. Probably get a Nobel Prize if it weren't
for the disrepute of his personal life. But that's no different than Francois
Villon or Christopher Marlowe or any number of Nobel types.

Gregory Corso is
another in my personal canon. I would also point out John Weiners here in
Boston, a great tragic poet. Creely is a great poet, a great academic poet,
too.

HB: What was it about William Carlos Williams that led him,
it seems alone of his generation, to see the virtue in your early work?

AG: He wasn't alone; there were any number of others.

I had known Williams
in Paterson. I had written him some letters which were, for him, a welcome
response from the streets of Paterson. Then I sent him some poems that were
imitations of his. He wrote me a little note saying, do you have more of these?

Years later I sent him
"Howl", which he didn't quite get because of the long line. He was
interested in measuring the short breath but he read "Howl" to some
younger people who were knocked out by it. He saw there was real emotion and
wrote me a letter saying so. I asked him for a preface and he did it,
understanding that I was dealing with new verse. When I got to
"Kaddish" he balked, afraid that the use of the paragraph abandoned
the search for an American measure. But he changed his mind and realized I was
doing something valuable emotionally or artistically, and he wrote a little
poem about it.

It wasn't just
Williams. Many of his contemporaries, like Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky, George
Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, responded. Even Pound liked it. According to his
daughter, he said, this is Ginsberg's hell; I'd be interested in seeing his
paradise.

HB: Williams would be open to you because he was listening
for an American voice.

AG: There was one time we visited him. Me and Peter Orlovsky
and Gregory Corso and Kerouac came to visit him in Rutherford. While Kerouac
went in the kitchen with his wife and charmed her--she said he was very
handsome and very sweet--we sat around and talked poetry. Gregory read him some
new poems, and he liked them. At the end we said, well Dr. Williams, here we
are ready to go, do you have any wise words for us? And he pointed out the
window, out on Ridge Road Rutherford, and said, "There's a lot of bastards
out there."

He was scared of the
fame and publicity that came and wasn't sure we could handle it. Because what
happened with the Beat writers was pretty astonishing for someone of the older
Modernist school whose editions were limited to one or two thousand. And it was
actually surprising to me that "Howl" went into more than that. We
originally printed 500, thinking of it as an esoteric book to be appreciated by
connoisseurs.

I don't think people
realized that I grew up in a poetry atmosphere.

HB: Your father was a poet.

AG: It was a family business. I knew rhyme and meter and
stanza from my eighth year and memorized endless Yeats, Vachel Lindsay, Edward
Arlington Robinson, Edna Millay and knew what was necessary to know as a basic
rhythmic specialist. There was the idea of Beat writers splashing their stuff
spontaneously which spread like a Frankenstein image among younger poets so
everybody thought they could just get away with writing anything they want.

HB: You did say, first pass best pass.

AG: No. First thought best thought. Actually I didn't say
it; a venerable Tibetan lama said it: first thought is best in art, second
thought in other matters, meaning you have to rely on your ur-thought, your
intuition, your organic understanding, your flash, your primordial mind.

"Journals
Mid-Fifties" is one out of three of my journal volumes published now.
There's potentially another 40 volumes. That's a lot of writing, a lot of
fidelity to the idea of art for art's sake, catching your mind, catching
yourself thinking.

HB: Do you dream as intensely as you did?

AG: Yeah. I had a great dream the other day of Carl Solomon
who died several years ago. I meet him in the afterlife and say, "How is
it there?"

He says, "Oh,
just like the mental hospital. You get along if you know the rules."

I say, "Well,
what are the rules?"

He says, "There
are two rules. First, remember you're dead. Second rule, act like you're
dead."

I woke up laughing.

HB: I reread "Kaddish" yesterday and was moved
again by the story of your mother's madness. Did she know in her blood what was
happening in Europe? Was that part of what drove her mad?

AG: I think very much. She had a hyper-sensitivity; she just
saw it in a mirror image and didn't realize that exactly what she was
complaining about in America was going on with all the Jews in Russia. She
thought there were wires and secret police and they were out to get her. Well,
it was happening in Russia and in Germany. In an attempt to rationalize an
unconscious awareness of that, she projected it on her own scene in America.

That wasn't the only
thing. There were family troubles, genetic things. Remember, my mother came
over from Russia at the age of twelve or so and had already seen Cossacks
coming down.

HB: After the experience of her madness it might seem you
were especially foolhardy to spend your time out on a limb seeking visions.

AG: But I also had been inoculated by the notion that once
everybody in the world disagreed with me, I should check back on my perceptions
and not insist, moderate the violence of my insistence.

HB: You learned something.

AG: How to stay out of the bughouse.

HB: At the same time you were seeking visions by all means
possible.

AG: No no no, they came on their own. Then I was checking
them out with psychedelics to see what approximation psychedelics would bring
to the natural experience. And I was reading William James's "Varieties of
Religious Experience" and various other books that dealt with out of the
ordinary mind states.

There's always been a
visionary aspect to America, from Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, the
Transcendentalists on. That's one of the mainstreams in America's melting pot.
There's a lot of mainstreams, unless you want to say the homogenized Time-Life
television consciousness is the mainstream.

HB: The effect of jazz on your generation has been much
remarked.

AG: We were listening to old blues and new jazz.

HB: How did the music affect your work?

AG: There was the myth Kerouac had about Lester Young
blowing 69 successive choruses of "Lady Be Good." The idea was the
increasing excitement--building chorus after chorus until you hit an ecstatic
orgasmic rhetorical rhapsody. The stream of verses, "Who, Who, Who,
Who," in "Howl", was an imitation of that chorus after chorus as
was the plateau of rhythmic ecstasy in the Moloch section.

HB: Is it significant to you that today is the last day of
Passover?

AG: Well, I had a couple of seders. I went with my brother
and his whole family and I will be going tomorrow to another gathering.

HB: Are they meaningful affairs for you?

AG: I've been going to seders for years, not so much as a
monotheist recollection but as a historical cultural recollection.
Monotheism--the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheist tradition--I think, as Blake
thought, is one of the curses of mankind, the idea of a single authority in the
universe. Blake said, "Six thousand years of sleep since the Garden of
Eden." Unconsciousness, sleepwalking, depending on a creator.

The Buddhist theme is,
"Daddy, is there a God?"

Daddy says,
"No."

The kid says,
"Whew."

Taking the roof off
the box. Getting out of the claustrophobic box of monotheist dictatorship.